Welcome Newb

We here at the Live Music Blog would like to introduce Tina Kelleher, whose first full-length feature article for the LMB — Taught to be Proud: Tea Leaf Green on Tour in the Northeast — is posted below.

Tina Kelleher (formerly Tina Campbell, whose writing you may have seen on Jambands.com) first caught the music bug at the tender age of 4 when she became fascinated by the horribly campy 70s movie version of The Beatles’ classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, featuring Peter Frampton as Billy Shears and The Bee Gees as the Henderson brothers.

Over the years she developed a particular fixation on lyrics, harmonies and dynamic, linear song structures which later metastasized into a penchant for the experimental. After discovering Phish in 1993, she spent several years seeing as many shows as she could before stumbling onto Strangefolk and their community of fans.

In 1997, she and a friend founded Strangers Helping Strangers, a charity organization which holds food drives at local concerts to benefit whichever homeless shelter or food bank is closest to the venue area. In 2000, Tina was asked to handle Strangefolk’s publicity, which she did for one year on a volunteer basis, but had to step down as other interests began to cut into her free time.

Tina stumbled on to Tea Leaf Green at Berkfest in 2002 when the band made their first trip out to the east coast and has been hooked ever since, even going so far as to plan her honeymoon around catching two of their hometown shows at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.